


Make Me an Instrument of Peace

by halcyon_autumn



Series: The World In Our Hands [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Gen, I'm very interested in the fact that Angela apparently BROUGHT REYES BACK TO LIFE??, Like that's some terrifying stuff for someone considered the 'team mom', Religious Imagery, Thoughts on guilt, but i don't think it's that graphic, she dresses up like an angel, there's a brief reference to torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 14:54:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7578421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halcyon_autumn/pseuds/halcyon_autumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angela Ziegler has always tried to do what is right and good, but her attempts have consequences. Overwatch is reforming and those consequences aren't something she can hide from as well as she used to.</p><p>Sometimes, maybe, she wasn't trying to do something all that good in the first place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make Me an Instrument of Peace

This is how Angela met Gabriel Reyes – in a hallway at Overwatch HQ, Jack Morrison at her side, awed in spite of herself at the sprawling power of this organization. Reyes looked her up and down berfore Commander Morrison could introduce them. From another man it might have seemed sexual, but Reyes just looked like he was trying to guess where she could be hiding weapons. It took concentrated effort not to flinch or step closer to Commander Morrison.

“Gabe,” Morrison said, a hint of tension in his voice. “This is Doctor Angela Ziegler.”

She expected Reyes to look calmer – well, less like he was thinking of ways to kill her, which didn’t quite happen. He still looked like he was wondering where she was hiding weapons, but now he was more approving about it. It didn’t lend credence to Morrison’s claim that Overwatch was “essentially a peacekeeping organization, not a military force.”

“Doctor Ziegler is here at my invitation,” Morrison said, and now he definitely sounded tense. “She’s interested in the more, ah, nonviolent elements of Overwatch.”

Reyes’ face did something complicated before settling into a polite mask, all of his earlier intensity gone. The change was sudden and sharp. “Nice to meet you, Doctor Ziegler. Let me know if you have any questions.”

There were any number of impression she could have taken away from that encounter – that Gabriel Reyes lived his life assuming that violence would occur at any moment; that he and Morrison were never quite on the same page; that everyone, to him, was just different levels of threatening.

What she actually took away was this: Gabriel Reyes was a man who’d been forced to lie a whole lot in his life, and he did it too easy and too quickly for something not to be very wrong.

She’d been wrong about a whole lot of things, but at least she’d been right about that.

Reyes came to talk to her after she joined, though she wasn’t sure if he was trying to correct that first impression or engage in basic team building. Maybe he just wanted to make conversation. “Didn’t think you were gonna join,” he said. “Morrison was real concerned. Reinhardt and Amari took bets.”

“Who voted against me?” she asked without looking, her hands going over her equipment. She didn’t have her Caduceus staff yet, so her equipment was mostly medical supplies and a small sidearm. She’d manage to stop touching the gun like it was a rattlesnake rather, so that was a success.

“Amari,” he said. “Me too, actually.”

She might have been offended if he hadn’t been so matter of fact about it. “Well, here I am.” Her hands didn’t shake as she checked her pistol, but she did tuck in some of the bandages a bit too vigorously.

Reyes didn’t try to comfort her, which she appreciated. And he didn’t try to comfort her after the mission, when she sat in the transport and thought _why did I think I could do this_ while her hands shook. He just nodded. “It’s like that sometime,” he said, and she nodded back.

Reyes didn’t go on missions as often as the others; later she would learn he was running Blackwatch, off killing or torturing or, or – she’d read the files after Reyes dumped them; the cold, detailed reports about people she knew ripping out someone’s central incisor. And cutting off a finger. And a toe. And then the other –

Angela threw up and turned on the news instead.

All these years later, and she couldn’t be angry at Reyes without being angry at Jack too. The Overwatch Commander might not have known what Blackwatch was doing – he couldn’t have, surely, because she couldn’t conceive of a world where Jack Morrison let that happen – but he’d certainly known there was a black ops group, and he knew just as well that Angela wouldn’t have touched Overwatch with a ten foot pole if she’d had a hint of it.

But her anger at Jack paled in comparison to what she felt for Reyes; it was hate, pure and simple. Angela disliked. She disagreed. She did not hate, and the first flicker of hatred had been nearly wiped away in shock. She hated Gabriel Reyes, and it had saved his life.

All through medical school, she’d promised herself not to grow cold and distant from her patients. The long years of her residency had tested that, when patients died in front of her, or slowly got worse despite her best efforts. She clung to kindness even when she felt that being a doctor was just the world digging its claws into her and ripping her open, demanding everything she had and then screaming for more when she gave it. And she’d endured it, because she was so starkly determined not to give in, to be the exact kind of woman that she’d dreamed of being since childhood.

And then Gabriel Reyes had been sprawled out in front of her, not a person so much a bag of burned skin losing blood, and she’d hated him. The HQ was too big to be taken out by a single explosion, but the main sections of the base were smoking rubble. Not the living quarters, though. And not her med bay.

But that didn’t matter; even if then entire building wasn’t destroyed, Overwatch was done. Blackwatch had turned it rotten and bloated like a corpse in the sun. She wanted to leave Gabriel to the same fate, turn away from him to deal with the screams and cries all around her.

Angela knew, logically, that she was kind, because she faced the struggle of remaining so through warzones and trauma wards alike. So she’d hated Gabriel, then dragged him away, thinking _if I hate him, I have to save him._ It wasn’t an emotional decision - her emotions hissed _let that traitor bleed out._ It wasn’t logical either, because logic said _save the ones who have a chance of living._ It was some mix of them both, something fueled by guilt and a desire not to be fueled by guilt, doing what she didn’t want to do because her _wants_ were barbed with rage.

She loaded him onto a stretcher and dragged him down to med bay.

Jack’s voice sounded in her head as she busied herself with equipment. _“Angela, what are you doing?”_ as she washed her hands. _“You read the files. The assassination in Thailand, the Cho kidnappings – Angela, he tortured at least 15 people, not counting those he ordered tortured.”_ She heaved Reyes’ body onto the table. _“What are you doing?”_

Her hands shook again, and she told herself it was hatred. It wasn’t.

“It’s your fault,” Jack told her six years later, standing in _her_ office, in _her_ hospital. “He’s out there – I saw him in Egypt. You did this, and people are dead because of it.”

“How many people are dead because of the number of times I saved you?” She asked him. Reyes was alive, he hadn’t died – no, compartmentalize. Doctors could always push death off to the corner, even if this was a case of not dead. “You, or Ana or – oh, remember when Amelie was shot and only survived because I was there? Is Gerard’s death on my hands?”

“It’s not the same, it’s –”

“I’m am not responsible for the actions of others,” she hissed, because Jack Morrison did not get to come into her hospital and deliver lectures on morality. “If that is how wrong and right works, we can dump the whole load of Blackwatch’s crimes on your hands.”

Jack actually snarled. “Sounds like you already have, Angela.”

“Get out,” she said. “Get out, Jack. We’re just going to yell at each other, and I’m not interesting in trading blame with you.”

“Well, too bad.” Jack stepped towards her. “I cannot possibly image what made you think saving him was a good idea.” He took a another step and Angela was suddenly afraid – not of Jack hurting her, but that he would realize it, that he would see why she’d done it and speak her shame out loud.

Almost, she asked him who had blown up the building. It wasn’t hard to imagine Reyes doing it. But seeing Jack now, she could imagine him looking at his best friend and deciding that if this was what it took to stop him, then he’d do it. Reyes was awfully hard to kill.

No, she wouldn’t go there. She was angry, she wanted to deflect, but there was no reason to go there.

“Did you love him, Angela? Can’t imagine letting a man with that much blood on his hands touch me, but – ”

She stopped her fist two inches from his face. Her arm shook with the force she’d had to pull at the last minute, and her nails dug into her palm. They stared at each other, Angela’s near-violence hanging in the air between them.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “That was –

“Get out,” she said, her voice too quiet in her own ears. Her fist was still up, shaking, and she wondered if she could punch that visor off his face.

He left.

Angela collapsed against the wall, wrapping her arms around herself as she slid to the floor. If only Jack was right; she wished that she’d been in love with Reyes, that her actions had at least come out of a positive place.

First, do no harm. Angela had taken a philosophy class in her undergrad and they’d spent hours arguing over the phrase. What constituted ‘harm?’ Could they do harm ‘second’ as long as it wasn’t first? How could you hold true to that tenant under any number of situations that no doctor would ever encounter? She’d found the entire thing ridiculous. If “do no harm” didn’t make a certain level of gut sense to you, you had no business being a doctor.

First, do no harm. She’d dragged Gabriel back from the dead, and the effort and skill required had made what she’d done for Genji look as simple as slapping a band aid on a papercut. Reyes had flat lined on the table. She could have let him go. Her conscience was satisfied, her hatred met with mercy, and now she could turn away and deal with Overwatch going up in flames. But she didn’t. Instead she pulled out more tools and got to work.

Because, deep down, she wanted to know if she could do it.

So Gabriel had come back, screaming in pain, his body turning to mist with her hands in his chest cavity. Angela hadn’t hated him so much that she wasn’t horrified by what she had done. He’d flat lined then, again, and she’d left because there were more people who needed her, a world screaming for answers that they deserved. And, if she was honest, what she was doing caught up to her. You didn’t do something like this just to see if you could.

They’d called her ‘The Angel of Overwatch’ during the glory days, her white suit and wings an easy invitation to the title. PR had loved it. The name made her more uncomfortable as the years went by. She took ‘Mercy’ as her call sign, an aspiration rather than a declaration. She refused to call herself an angel, ever, and it made her squirm when other people did. Did any of them have even a passing familiarity with the Bible?

Angels stood guard at the Garden of Eden, swords of fire in their hands. An angel had killed every firstborn son in Egypt. The Angel of Overwatch tried to bring a man back from death and instead she brought Death itself into the world, angry and bitter and ready to terrorize. And she’d done it not at the behest of a god, not with a divine mandate, but because she wanted to know if she could.

There was no one to hide behind but herself. For years she’d done it, using kindness and compassion to hide the part of herself that looked at her hands, at the lives she’d saved, and whispered _what else am I capable of_? And then compassion and kindness went to war with hatred and fury, and that secret part of herself pulled on a pair of gloves, looked down at Gabriel Reyes, and whispered _now what do we have here_?

She didn’t feel guilt for the people any of her patients had killed. But doing that to Reyes? Yes. She felt guilt for that.

Jack hadn’t seen it, she told herself, still on the floor of her office. Who knew what he’d come up with to explain it – maybe he’d pin it on her compassion. It burned her to think of her kindness fashioned into a weakness, but better that than the alternative. No one knew – well, maybe Reyes did, or at least suspected. But no one else. She could hide it from everyone else.

When the call came in – Winston, of course it was Winston, who among them but Winston could bring Overwatch back without it being an act of staggering pride – Angela took weeks to answer. _Let Overwatch finally die_ , she thought, but also _I did so much good there_ and even _maybe we can be everything I dreamed of this time._ Not emotional, but not logical either. Some mix of both.

So she listened to what she wanted, not what she thought or felt. Because what she wanted, more than anything, was not to damn someone else because she was playing God. Nothing mattered quite as much as that. Nothing she wanted could – would – contradict that.

She found that she wanted to go back.

Winston was there, and Tracer and Reinhardt. Torbjörn was on his way, they said, and Genji was coming too. They had some ideas about other recruits, which Angela thought was rather ambitious. Overwatch was functioning illegally. Half the base didn’t have power, thought the whole base did have mice. When she finally made her way to the medical ward it was all dust and darkness, a place for the dead.

Angela thought of Reyes, his body turning to smoke under her fingertips. And she thought also of Jack, the way he’d sat down and comforted her after her first mission when she’d shot someone and missed because her hands were shaking. She thought of Winston, who was a banked fire of faith just waiting to blaze up in all of them.

 

Angela bought some cleaning supplies, wiped the place down, and started looking for people who needed help.

**Author's Note:**

> There's some in game dialogue that makes it sound like Angela is actually the one who made Reaper/Reyes into, you know, the creepy wraith dude who eats souls and can't die. I've been fascinated by it, so I wrote this out to try to work through why Mercy did it, and how you live with the knowledge that someone you knew and saved is now a killer working for a terrorist organization. 
> 
> The title is modified from a quote by St Francis of Assisi: "Make me an instrument of Thy peace."
> 
> I wrote everything to be platonic, but reading pretty much any relationship in this as romantic adds a nice element to the angst, so read it that way if you want. Imagine if you were in love with a dude who turned out to be torturing/killing/kidnapping people. I'd lie about that to myself too. Anyway, read it however you want.
> 
> So basically I took that thing people do sometimes where they make a woman's pain only matter so far as it affects a man and I, uh, inverted the genders. Whoops. It was an accident, but I was too pleased with the outcome to change it. Maybe I'll write something from Reyes' point of view to make up for it.
> 
> Come say hi on tumblr maybe? http://buckynating.tumblr.com/


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